Blameful Post-Mortems

Late to reply, but I took some time to consider my thoughts. First, I want to be a little bit angry:

>As a quick aside - I absolutely hate how most people treat incentives. So many leaders act like incentives are the only thing you can expect people to follow. >Hey, my top sales guy sold a $1M deal but did it at -90% margin, but there was no rule against it, so what do you expect? >There is one main incentive that all employees have - act with high integrity or get fired. Stop excusing people for bad behavior because your little point systems don’t cover every case of common sense.

This is completely unacceptable. The idea that someone could ever feel so insulated from accountability for the business priorities they set that they could even imagine getting away with saying something like this disgusts me. "Oh don't do what I told you and paid you to do, ~do the right thing!~"

Second, to try to directly address the problem: this article shows a complete lack of systems thinking. Systems thinking requires more intellectual investment from managers, but is ultimately the only way to get consistently good results. This is something we established by the 1980s so it's really frustrating that I'm seeing people having to re-prove this in modern times. Yes, it's easier to just blame people for their mistakes, but we stopped doing that decades ago because it doesn't lead to better results.

Finally, the reality is that I have never in my career seen a situation that could be made better by applying more blame. The reason for this is because there is no such situation, and anyone who suggests there is so fundamentally misunderstands what we are trying to do that they simply can't contribute to this kind of discussion. When you blame a person you are specifically choosing not to fix the system that actually caused the problem.